The Putin Olympics

Who would hold the Winter Olympics in a summer resort? Vladimir Putin is who. In the triumph of what can only be called a preposterous idea, three short weeks from now the Russian president will draw the world’s attention to a grand legacy project of his own fantastic design. Nearly seven years ago, Putin personally pitched the International Olympic Committee to choose Sochi for these winter games. Sochi? Picture the Jersey Shore in the 1950s—plus palm trees and minus, until recently, the widespread luxury of indoor plumbing in the huts that locals rent to beachgoers. The place sits on the same latitude as the French Riviera, and until Putin fell in love with it, was best known for the packs of Soviets who used to sun themselves on the rocky shore of the Black Sea.

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Sochi today is Putin’s personal pride, a project of such colossal authoritarian branding that it’s hard to think of a more recent example of a political leader so closely involved in such a grandiose building spree. For these past seven feverish years, the city has been Europe’s largest construction site—only recently declared by the Kremlin ready to host the Games that start on Feb. 7. Putin himself is in Sochi now, where he is personally reviewing final preparations, granting interviews and generally taking a tsar-like approach to inspecting what his billions have bought. And billions it has been: The overall price tag for the Games has now reached somewhere between $50 billion and $55 billion, a figure that makes this not only the most expensive Olympics in history, but also pricier than all previous Winter Olympiads put together.

Putin’s Olympics are first and foremost political, a chance to project the image of the new, confident and rich Russia, one “risen off its knees” by the neo-authoritarian administration of the last 14 years. Alexei Makarkin, a leading Russian political sociologist, called the Olympiad the “most prestigious undertaking of Russia’s present regime.”

No effort has been too strenuous, no weather too warm, no terrorist threat too immediate and, of course, no amount of state treasure too large to ensure success. Whether Putin has planned it or not, the Sochi Olympiad looks as if it has the perfect timing to be the crescendo of a string of international successes he has enjoyed over the past year, when he managed both to prevent a U.S. military intervention in Syria and to steal the title of “world’s most powerful man” (at least, the Forbes magazine version) from Barack Obama. (Asked whether it was his personal reputation at stake in the Games, Putin told ABC News’s George Stephanopoulos, “No, no. I want it to be the nation’s success… not my personal ambition.”)

And yet Putin’s expectations for a triumph may run into a stone wall of reality. Many are bracing for a disruption, even disaster. The Sochi games will be the first Winter Olympiad held in the subtropics and not unrelatedly, the gap between what has been needed by way of infrastructure and what was already available had never been as deep and wide. It is also beset with protest; it’s the first Olympics to be held in an area of mass expulsion of an indigenous people, whose descendants accuse Russia of genocide. Perhaps most hazardously of all, it is the first (and almost certainly the last) Olympiad to be held within a few hundred miles of a low-intensity but deadly jihad. Indeed, this is without a doubt the most precarious Olympiad ever attempted, for reasons of geography, climate and infrastructure—but also for the way the regime has chosen to address these challenges. Will Putin’s triumphalist narrative prevail? Maybe.

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Sochi sits on the same latitude as the French Riviera. | Wikimedia Commons

In putting his Winter Olympiad near a beach resort, Putin seems to be possessed of what might be called the Peter the Great complex: emulating the tsar who built his capital, from scratch, on a swamp.

His affection for the area is connected perhaps less to the beach than to the nearby ski resort in the craggy Caucasus Mountains, Krasnaya Polyana, which is his favorite. And in the effort to situate the Games there, the avid skier has loomed large from the very start. In July 2007, Putin flew to Guatemala to lobby the IOC, which he addressed first in English, a language he almost never speaks in public. He told the IOC members about the ancient Greeks who once lived around Sochi and how, when skiing in the area, he could see the rock, to which, according to an ancient Greek legend, the gods chained Prometheus as punishment for giving men fire. What better place to connect the Promethean flame with the Olympic torch than Sochi? To impress the judges with a final flourish, Putin ended his presentation in French, which no one knew he spoke. The committee’s vote went for Sochi 51 to 47 over the South Korean city of Pyeongchang. On hearing the news, a large Russian delegation erupted in ovation and began to throw snow in the air. Putin sat, beaming, in the front row.

Ever since, Putin’s hand has never left the rudder. He put one of his closest and most trusted aides, Dmitry Kozak, in charge of Olympic preparations, creating a deputy prime minister position specifically for the purpose. Kozak, considered a skillful manager, had been previously dispatched by Putin to be a kind of super-governor in Russia’s most violent Southern federal district where the Islamic insurgency that now threatens the Games began after the “pacification” of Chechnya in the early 2000s. In another early appointment, Putin picked the head of the FSB’s counterintelligence department, General Oleg Syromolotov, to lead security efforts. In the KGB, which Putin joined in his early 20s, and in its successor agency, the FSB, which Putin once headed, counterintelligence officers have long been considered the elite—the most competent, most loyal and least corrupt. Then, when the first head of Olympstroy, the government agency working under Kozak to produce the Games, reportedly cited huge cost overruns only 14 months into his tenure, he was fired. Putin then personally hired and terminated two successors.

Leon Aron is resident scholar and director of Russian Studies at the American Enterprise Institute and author, most recently, ofRoads to the Temple: Truth, Memory, Ideas and Ideals in the Making of the Russian Revolution, 1987-1991.